Editorial: Open for business

Italians have always had a relaxed attitude toward such matters as taxes and irksome commercial demands on their free time. Presiding over this relaxed sense of civic and commercial commitment was Silvio Berlusconi, the high-living prime minister for most of the years since 1994.

To no one's surprise, the country is now in financial crisis, with a massive national debt of $2.5 trillion that it is struggling to finance. Because of that, and perhaps because his social antics had become tiresome, Mr. Berlusconi resigned last November.

An economist and academic named Mario Monti was invited to form a new government. He has proposed a plan to liberalize the heavily regulated economy. He did, however, slip one bombshell through. Since Jan. 1, stores, shops, bars and restaurants can remain open 24 hours a day, year round. Mr. Monti hopes it will boost consumer spending and employment.

Americans take it for granted that one should be able to rush out at 11 p.m. Sunday to buy a 58-inch flat-screen TV. But in Italy the idea that any business can be open at any time is being greeted, as one major newspaper put it, as nothing less than "a real and true revolution" and a social upheaval on the order of the fall of the Berlin Wall.